his bathrobe. “If he comes in the bedroom, I don’t think he’ll believe you were in here helping me wash the windows. Maybe you could say you were making a house call, Doctor.”
“Screw you, Peter,” Amy said. “This is not funny!”
But she did get back into the bed and pulled the sheet up over her.
Peter turned the lights off, then left the bedroom, closing the door.
Then he turned and knocked on it.
“Morals squad!” he announced. “Open up!”
“You bastard!” Amy called, but she was chuckling.
Peter turned the lights on in the living room, walked to the door, and opened it.
Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin—who, in the process of maintaining his friendly relationship with the widow of his pal Sergeant John F. X. Moffitt, had become so close to the Payne family that all the Payne kids had grown up thinking of him as Uncle Denny—stood at the door.
In a cloud of Old Bushmills fumes, Peter’s nose immediately told him.
“I was in the neighborhood, Peter,” Coughlin said, “and thought I would take a chance and see if you were still up.”
Peter had just enough time to decide, Bullshit, twice. I don’t think you were in the neighborhood, and even if you were, you got on the radio to get my location, and if you did that, you would have asked the operator to call me on the phone to see if I was up, when Coughlin added:
“That’s bullshit. I wanted to see you. Radio said you were home. I’m sorry if I got you up. You got something going in there, I’ll just go.”
Does he suspect Amy is in here with me?
“Come on in. I was about to go to bed. We’ll have a nightcap.”
“You’re sure?” Coughlin asked.
“Come on in,” Peter repeated.
Coughlin followed him into the living room, sat down on Peter’s white leather couch—a remnant, like several other pieces of very modern furniture in the apartment, of a long-dead and almost forgotten affair with an interior decorator—and reached for the telephone.
As Peter took ice, glasses, and a bottle of James Jamison Irish whiskey from the kitchen, he heard Coughlin on the telephone.
“Chief Coughlin,” he announced, “at Inspector Wohl’s house,” and then hung up.
Peter set the whiskey, ice, and glasses on the coffee table in front of the couch and sat down in one of the matching white leather armchairs.
Coughlin reached for the whiskey, poured an inch into a glass, and took a sip.
“This is not the first I’ve had of these,” he said, holding up the glass. “Mickey O’Hara came by the Roundhouse at six, and we went out and drank our dinner.”
“There’s an extra bed here,” Peter said, “if you don’t feel up to driving home.”
And then he remembered that not only was Amy in his bed, where she could hear the conversation, but that the moment she heard what he had just said she would decide he was crazy or incredibly stupid. Or, probably, both.
If Denny Coughlin accepted the offer, there was no way he would not find out that Amy was here.
Coughlin ignored the offer.
“The trouble with Mickey is that he has a nose like a bird dog, and people tell him things they think he would like to know,” Coughlin said. “And he thinks like a cop.”
“He would have made a good cop,” Peter agreed.
He poured whiskey in a glass and added ice.
“After he fed me about four of these,” Coughlin said, “he asked me whose birthday party it was we were all at at the Rittenhouse Club.”
“We meaning you, me, Matt, and the FBI?”
Coughlin nodded.
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him that Matty had had a little run-in with a couple of FBI agents, and you and I were pouring oil on some troubled waters.”
“Did he buy it?”
“He said he was naturally curious why a couple of FBI agents who don’t even work in Philadelphia were following Matty around in the first place.”
“He knew they had been following him? God, he does find things out, doesn’t he?” Wohl said.
“Including some things that you and I didn’t know,” Coughlin said. “Like when those two FBI agents were waiting in the Special Operations parking lot to see if Matty was coming out, a Highway Patrol sergeant—Nick DeBenedito—thought they looked suspicious and went and tapped on their car window and asked them who they were.”
Coughlin smiled, and Wohl laughed.
“It’s not funny, Peter,” Coughlin said. “And it gets worse. The FBI guys showed Nick their identification, and told him they were on the job, surveilling the guy driving the Porsche,